When Your Opinion is Ignored

I was recently asked how best to respond when you are asked for your opinion, then your opinion is ignored. The question was in the context of someone who had been asked to assist with some interviews for a position in another business unit, but then her fellow interviewers refused to take her input into account.

Here was my recommendation. I'd be interested in other peoples' comments.

It really stinks to be asked for your opinion and then have it ignored. I have sometimes seen that sort of dynamic set up when someone's manager tells them to ask for help, and they resent the order from their manager. (Frequently, they feel like it reflects on their own competence.) They can't disrespect their manager, so they disrespect the person whose advice they have been told to seek.

If you're stuck in that sort of dynamic, make your written recommendations, cc your boss and their boss so that they know that the recommendations have been made in a businesslike and thoughtful way. (You may need to let the report sit overnight and re-edit it in the morning to remove any lingering snarkiness left over from your own hurt feelings from being disrespected.)

Then move on. You have fulfilled your request in a businesslike way. What they do with their time and their responsibility is on them.

In the case where you are asked to interview a bunch of subjects, give a written evaluation of them (I usually use a letter grade like in school--A, B+, D-, etc as a way to summarize), and leave the decision to them.

(If you look at the NFL scouting reports on players from before the draft, you will see a really useful approach to looking at the qualifications of a candidate in a summary way. You probably won't be talking about how fast the candidate runs the 40-yard dash, so substitute in professional requirements instead.)

Your Relationship with Your Boss

Your relationship with your boss is your responsibility. No other relationship will be more important to determining how successful you are in your position. It is not your boss's responsibility to manage this relationship; it is yours.

There are several elements of a successful relationship with your boss:

• Keep your boss in the loop. If you don't tell your boss what you are doing, other people will. And you might not be happy with the quality of the information in the updates they provide.
• Alert your boss to problems, preferably before they blow up. It is better to communicate problems earlier than later. It is best if you can present your boss with your plan of action along with the alert.
• Don't expect your boss to adopt your working style. Everyone does things differently, and you will need to meet your boss's expectations, not the other way around.
• Be up front about what you can deliver and on what timeline. Negotiate expectations that you can meet.
• Consider your boss's priorities. Your job is to make your boss's job easier. This includes being aware of your boss's peer relationships and trying not to cause friction.

Cloud Computing for the Enterprise

Up to now, a lot of the focus around cloud computing has been on rapid deployment, cost, and flexibility. These are all important, but more is needed in an enterprise setting. Enterprise customers need the efficiencies gained from improved management and automation capabilities, as well as the flexibility to use converged services such as PaaS (Platform as a Service). A Peer1 Hosting white paper suggests some additional characteristics you should be looking at in an enterprise-class cloud provider.

1. What are the capabilities of the infrastructure underlying the vendor's offering? What redundancies and reliability measures are in place?
2. What level of support is available? Most enterprises need round-the-clock support by front-line experts who can quickly resolve performance or availability issues.
3. What facilities are available to ease deployment? How easy is it to set up best practices templates that can be leveraged for consistency across the enterprise?
4. How hard is it to manage the environment? In what ways does the vendor support methods to ease patch management, monitoring, or job scheduling across the environment?
5. What support is available for inventory management? VM sprawl is a real problem in an environment where the cost of setting up and abandoning systems is "cheap."
6. Is there support to allow different business units to manage aspects of their own environments separate from other departments or the overall enterprise?
7. Does the vendor offer additional layers of converged services, such as PaaS (Platform as a Service) or DaaS (Database as a Service)? If so, are the offerings aligned with the enterprise's overall technology direction?
8. To what extent has the vendor simplified the overall management process?

The High Cost of Bad Bosses

A recent workplace study by Evolv quantified the cost we pay as a result of incompetent managers.

The annual cost of bad management to the US economy is estimated as $360 billion. Three of four workers characterized dealing with their supervisor as the most stressful part of their day, and that employee/manager relationships were the best predictor of retention rates.

Supervisors who engage with their teams were found to have retention rates 5 to 6 times greater than those of "drill sergeant" supervisors.

Looking Around the Corner

Sometimes you can see the problem coming before it gets here. You've tried to warn people, you've raised flags, and the problem is coming. The people around you are in full ostrich mode, hoping that if they don't see the problem, it won't see them.

Or maybe you look out six months, and you see a trend that is going to need a different approach.

Do yourself and your employer a favor. Prepare.

When the problem is at the doorstep and people are looking for a solution, you will have a plan, and you will have laid the groundwork for its execution.

This doesn't mean that you sit passive-aggressively in your cube hoping that things will go south. Part of preparing is evangelizing your solution to other people. Don't harp on about it, but look for allies who also see the problem and want to think about possible solutions. When you take a solution with broad buy-in to your bosses, it is much more likely to be implemented successfully.